The list of red flags was long enough to turn into a scary bedtime story. But he was my age, cute, sort of funny in a “mock you because I like you” third-grader kind of way, and had a decent job, so I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt. Silly me. I had met him online. At the end of our third date, he &ldquo

Oct. 21 will always be a special date for Michelle and Nick Markovsky. It’s the day the Yorba Linda couple found out they would become parents twice, three years apart.That date does not mark the birthday of their two children. It is the date the couple adopted them after being married for 10 years and unable to conceive. Coinc

Carrington at 1 year and Cadence at 2 years
Being stuck in the house during several days of rainy weather, Cadence and Carrington were eager to go outdoors. When the sun finally came out, I raced home from work so my girls could get outside. Cadence started giving Carrington a tutorial on drawing with chalk, or what she likes to call &ld

In the May issue of OC Family magazine, you’ll find a brand-new monthly column called “Modern Parents.” We wanted to explore not only what it means to be a parent today in terms of how you raise your kids, but to investigate the whole glorious scope of life with children.Modern families look quite a bit different fr

You notice your child is sneezing a lot. Then she tells you her nose is running and her throat hurts. Her eyes are watering a little, and she seems tired too. Yes – those are the telltale signs that she’s coming down with a cold. There’s little you can do to stop it now. Common colds are the main reason children

Most working parents understand the anxiety that accompanies trying to find the right child care center.In 2014, nearly 1.79 million children younger than 6 needed child care in California, according to Child Care Aware (childcareaware.org). The average annual cost of infant care in California

My younger brother and I had an intense sibling rivalry going when we were children – one reason that I grew up to be extremely competitive.If you say to me, “I’m going to climb Mt. McKinley,” then I will retort, “Well, I’m going to climb Mt. Everest, so there.”I’d

I woke up in the middle of the night, my sister’s feet in my face and Kim’s back pressing me into the wall, but that wasn’t the worst part: I desperately missed my mother.I crawled over the sleeping forms of my friend and sister, then navigated the dark hallway until I found the living room. I hesitated, spooked by

When Trisha Tingley’s family got the chance to move to Amsterdam in 2005 for husband Mickel’s work, she knew it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. And upon the Tingleys’ return to O.C. a few years ago, she was ready to focus on new goals. “I went from a career as a buyer in the compute

In the era of Snapchat, texting and Twitter, bullying has transformed from name calling in the cafeteria to cruel online harassment. According to recent studies conducted by the Cyber Bullying Research Center, 25 percent of middle and high school students have experienced cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has many incarnations, from making fu

Quinn, age 1
Quinn’s birthday was finally here! She’s 1 ... already. We’d talked about taking her to the San Diego Zoo for months because we wanted her to experience what her brother did on his first birthday a mere two years earlier. The only difference is that she loves animals. All animals. We stood patiently in line

“He’s always staring out the window, as if he’s in his own world,” the teacher at my son’s after-school conference said.
I can’t remember who the teacher was or what year it was because every teacher has been saying some version of that to my husband and me at every parent-teacher conference since Malc

My good friend, let’s call her Jessie, loves to gamble. As a result of this, she can never enter a casino. Period. Never ever.She’s learned this through painful experience, including losing $2,500 one afternoon while she was stuck in Las Vegas because her father-in-law had just had a heart attack there.Her hus

A lot of things happen to your body when you’re pregnant. Many of them are good (lush hair, glowing skin, plump breasts); and some of them are less than amazing (swollen fingers, stretch marks, hair in strange places).In a perfect world, we’re totally OK with all of it. We are beacons of confidence and proclaim our bodies